Gentlemen, I have now laid before you a few of the reasons for taking away the penalties of the act of 1699, and for refusing to establish them on the riotous requisition of 1780.  Because I would not suffer anything which may be for your satisfaction to escape, permit me just to touch on the objections urged against our act and our resolves, and intended as a justification of the violence offered to both Houses.  “Parliament,” they assert, “was too hasty, and they ought, in so essential and alarming a change, to have proceeded with a far greater degree of deliberation.”  The direct contrary.  Parliament was too slow.  They took fourscore years to deliberate on the repeal of an act which ought not to have survived a second session.  When at length, after a procrastination of near a century, the business was taken up, it proceeded in the most public manner, by the ordinary stages, and as slowly as a law so evidently right as to be resisted by none would naturally advance.  Had it been read three times in one day, we should have shown only a becoming readiness to recognize, by protection, the undoubted dutiful behavior of those whom we had but too long punished for offences of presumption or conjecture.  But for what end was that bill to linger beyond the usual period of an unopposed measure?  Was it to be delayed until a rabble in Edinburgh should dictate to the Church of England what measure of persecution was fitting for her safety?  Was it to be adjourned until a fanatical force could be collected in London, sufficient to frighten us out of all our ideas of policy and justice?  Were we to wait for the profound lectures on the reason of state, ecclesiastical and political, which the Protestant Association have since condescended to read to us?  Or were we, seven hundred peers and commoners, the only persons ignorant of the ribald invectives which occupy the place of argument in those remonstrances, which every man of common observation had heard a thousand times over, and a thousand times over had despised?  All men had before heard what they dare to say, and all men at this day know what they dare to do; and I trust all honest men are equally influenced by the one and by the other.

But they tell us, that those our fellow-citizens whose chains we have a little relaxed are enemies to liberty and our free Constitution.—­Not enemies, I presume, to their own liberty.  And as to the Constitution, until we give them some share in it, I do not know on what pretence we can examine into their opinions about a business in which they have no interest or concern.  But, after all, are we equally sure that they are adverse to our Constitution as that our statutes are hostile and destructive to them?  For my part, I have reason to believe their opinions and inclinations in that respect are various, exactly like those of other men; and if they lean more to the crown than I and than many of you think we ought, we must remember that he who aims at another’s life is not to be surprised, if he flies into any sanctuary that will receive him.  The tenderness of the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that men are inclined to favor the means of their own safety is so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the ridicule.